Snowed in with Mass Effect 2

Big snow storm hit the East Coast this weekend, so I stayed in the entire weekend playing Mass Effect 2.

Let me say I loved that game, I ended up putting in ~40 hours on my first run through as a Sentinel. Overall I enjoyed the Sentinel gameplay, it gave a good mix of tech and biotic powers that allowed a lot of flexibility when faced with a wide variety of foes. Because I was able to deal with organics, mechs and shield/armor based foes myself, I had a good amount of latitude in my teammate choices. One thing I hate is feeling forced into using certain people just because you have to cover a hole in your offensive capabilities.

I'm probably gonna play through again as a Soldier to get a feel for the game in a different play style, although I'm also pondering playing as a Vanguard. One of my co-workers played as a Vanguard and wasn't as happy with it because he felt it was a one-trick pony with biotic charge. Once you charged, you were left in the middle of a group of enemies without any cover and gimped weapons (he didn't think the shotgun was very powerful, even fully upgraded).

From a game developer point of view, I was very impressed with the game. I saw a number of small bugs, like the camera not focusing correctly or characters not appearing in the camera's view; plus a couple of show-stopper bugs like getting stuck on invisible walls. I had 2 instances where I was forced to restart the current mission because I was stuck on a wall and couldn't move. The wide variety of possible endings was another thing I found very cool. Talking to my co-workers today, the four of us who finished the game over the weekend all experienced slightly different endings. Providing the player with the ability to influence the ending like that was a very very cool move on Bioware's part, and it would be interesting to see that in more games.